[rescue] Weird Silicon Graphics o2 graphics issues

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 02:52:50PM -0400, Andrew Weiss wrote:

> I never understood really why X was designed in this broken way.  Why 
> "use-up" colors at all?... A little bit of extra logic and you could 
> display all visible apps with any color they want.  I think even early 
> versions of Windows did this so X is not alone.

I haven't seen evidence that Windows could ever do that on a 256 color
display, nor can I think of any possible way to pull that off on a VGA
card.  A VGA card can only display 256 colors on the screen at a time
reguardless of how many applications there are running.

To give each app their own 256 color colorspace is not an easy task to
implement on plain frame buffers.  I can think of several ways to
implement a frame buffer that would allow that, but each such way would
only be able to accomodate up to a fixed number of programs on the
screen at once.  Given a truecolor frame buffer though, giving each 256
color program it's own 256 color colorspace is an easy enough trick, if
done in software.